Geoffrey A. Landis

Poetry

The Book of Whimsy (NightBallet Press 2016)

In addition to science and science fiction, I also sometimes
write poetry.

I'd been writing a little bit of poetry here and there ever since I was in college, of course, but mostly not showing it to people. When I went to Clarion, Joe Haldeman got me interested in the possibilities of science fiction poetry, altough, again, I only wrote the occasional poem now and then, mostly as a way to keep writing in the bits and pieces of time that weren't enough to write stories.

In the late '80s, when I moved to the Cleveland
area, I hooked up with the local poetry scene. Somewhat to my surprise, Cleveland has quite a vibrant
poetry scene, and I started writing quite a bit of poetry, doing readings at local
poetry venues like the Junkstock festival, and
publishing in area 'zines like ArtCrimes and Icon
and Coventry Reader-- as well as science
fiction magazines like Asimov's and Amazing
and Pulphouse. By the mid to the late '90s,
as I got busy with other things, my poetry writing dwindled down
(although I never completely stopped; I won the Asimov's Reader's Award, and the Rhysling
award for best short poem in 2000), and had a few of my poems picked up for best-of-the-year collections and other anthologies. Then, in the early '00s,
Cleveland glass artist and poet Marcus Bales started a reading series
at his art gallery, Gallery 324, and invited me to be a featured
reader; a year or two later, Joshua Gage informed me that I needed to
be at the Deep
Cleveland reading series, so I started being a regular (well,
maybe an irregular) and occasionally a featured reader there. Somewhere
in there, Mary and Jim Stanley and a few others discovered that there
were a critical mass of SF poets within easy driving distance, and so a group of us started getting together for dinner and snacks... and
critiquing poetry. So, stimulated by all the activity, I've been
writing more poetry again lately...

Gallery 321 eventually closed shop, but by then Marcus had
already founded a small press, VanZeno, with the goal of publishing
poetry collections by some of the poets he'd featured in the readings,
and other poets that he thought needed to be collected. So, to bring a long story to an end, my first collection of poems, Iron
Angels, came out from VanZeno Press.

Writing about poetry

I've joined the cabal of poets who write on the Cleveland poetics blog (I try to post once a week.) Feel free to check it out, even if you're not a Cleveland poet! Here are all my posts. Or, some selected posts: